Interesting Links: April 28, 2019

Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.

Straight from my RSS feed:

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Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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1. Gab's Brave Browser Fork Uses Bitcoin Lightning Network Instead of BAT - Gab's dissenter browser plugin was blocked by Google & Apple stores, so now Gab has previewed the dissenter browser a fork of the Brave browser that uses Bitcoin Lightning Network instead of BAT, and disables some settings that GAB claims favor advertisers & Silicon Valley over users. Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, responded with an unhappy Tweet.


2. Our Brains Tell Us We’ve Done Something Before We Actually Do It - A study in Science Advances reports on Scientists from Arizona State University who were inspired by arguments over out of bounds calls in basketball to research human perception on the timing of our actions. In the study, participants who completed an action at the same time as another person (or a mechanical device) generally perceived that their own activity happened first, by about 50 ms. The article suggests that the perceived lead time stems from the brain compensating for sensory lag by predicting what will happen in order to be able to react in real time. h/t RealClearScience


3. How one journal became a “major retraction engine - The article describes how complaints from an online quality checker led to a multiyear investigation and a sharp increase in retractions at the PLoS ONE journal. Open source advocates have long held that open source code is more secure because it is subject to scrutiny by anyone in the world. There may be similar forces at work here, since Open Access makes it easier for quality checkers to critique the PLoS ONE journal.


4. Wing receives the first FAA certification for drone deliveries - Alphabet's Wing hopes to start trials in Virginia later this year. They have been testing in the US since 2016, and flown 70,000 flights since 2014 in Australia, where they have made more than 3,000 deliveries.


5. Helping others makes us happier -- but it matters how we do it - In this TED talk, Elizabeth Dunn discusses her research on happiness. People enjoy giving money to charity, but only if they feel connected to the recipient, and if it's not done out of a sense of duty or obligation.


6. Video Friday: Massive Solar-Powered Drone, and More - IEEE Spectrum's "weekly selection of awesome robot videos" from April 26.


7. Microsoft is winning the techlash - The article lists many factors, but the one that rang true to me is that, in contrast with knee jerk reactions from companies like Google and Facebook, Microsoft takes a more methodical approach to controversies. This may be a result of the anti-trust actions that were taken against the company during the 1990s. h/t OS News


8. IBM's head of HR says '100% of jobs are going to change' with AI. Here's how the tech giant is adapting. - Internal software analyzes skills and writing samples to match workers with business needs, finding ways to redeploy workers instead of laying them off; and facilities are being set up to provide workers with continuous learning capabilities.


9. Honeybees Can Put Two and Two Together - Scientific American's 60 Second Science explains how researchers at France's Paul Sabatier University demonstrated that honey bees can learn to solve simple arithmetic problems.


10. STEEM The Cynic's Desk: The BRAVE Browser and Earning Cryptocurrency (BAT) for Watching Ads - @denmarkguy posts his take on the Brave Browser's new payment mechanism. Anticipating an army of "penny miners" who will subvert Brave's anti-fraud controls, he anticipates a cycle of abuse and a decline in legitimate use. (@denmarkguy will receive 5% of this post's payout)

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### About this series

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